Description
A “synopsis” is a brief overview that provides readers insights into a larger/more complex issue. In a 250 word essay, please write a synopsis covering the materials that we studied in this module. You may focus on whatever event/person/idea you found most compelling. To earn the full credit, students will need to (a) write a cogent essay (b) meet or exceed the required word count, and (c) cite two examples of supporting evidence from the assigned texts or module lecture. No need for formal citations; just parenthetical notes like (Demsky lecture) or (Starr, 56).
Gilded Age Politics 1877-1900
American politics during the Gilded Age reflected, to a large degree, the dynamics unfolding in the larger society. Just as a class of super elite robber barons expanded their wealth and status on the backs on newly arrived immigrants, so, too did organizations know as “political machines.” The term used to describe the leaders of these “machines” was “boss.” Machine politics was a byproduct of the urbanization process we studied last week. Particularly as it applied to using immigrant voters to support political candidates, the new urban centers were well known for their “bosses” and “machines.”
In recent years, it has become commonplace to characterize politics in the Gilded Age as corrupt and issueless. The major parties, this view holds, “divided over spoils, not issues” and over “patronage, not principle.” This view is quite misleading. Gilded Age politics were exciting and transformational. Perhaps owing to the power of “machines,” the period witnessed a higher level of voter turnout than at any other time in American history. The federal government, during this period, assumed greater authority and power over banking and currencies, taxes and tariffs, land and immigration. Elected officials were slowly gearing up to take on the robber barons’ power. Gilded Age politics were also principled in clear ways. This was the period that welcomed in the temperance and saw the women’s rights crusades take on a greater importance.
Nevertheless, the power of the bosses, and control of what was know as the “spoils system” that allowed machines to reward supporters with jobs and contracts, is an unavoidable part of Gilded Age discussions. George Plunkitt, a local leader of New York City’s Democratic Party, defended the spoils system. “You can’t keep an organization together without patronage,” he declared. “Men ain’t in politics for nothin’. They want to get somethin’ out of it.”
This idea was well established in American political history. During the 1830s, Andrew Jackson had first introduced the spoils system to the federal government. The practice, epitomized by the saying “to the victory belong the spoils,” involved placing party supporters into government positions. An incoming president would dismiss thousands of government workers and replace them with members of his own party. This practice certainly ensured that officials would be loyal to their leader, but it also meant that bureaucrats might not be of the highest caliber and possibly also that corruption could ensue. The Credit Mobilier scandal under the Grant administration was a “last straw” as citizens of the Gilded Age soon began mounting demand for reform.
Ironically, the president who led the successful campaign for civil service, Chester Arthur, a Republican, was linked to a party faction from New York that was known for its abuse of the spoils of office. In fact, in 1878, Arthur had been fired from his post at New York Federal Custom’s Collection for giving away too many patronage jobs. As president, however, Arthur became an ardent reformer. He insisted that high-ranking members of his own party be prosecuted for their part in a Post Office scandal. He vetoed a law to improve rivers and harbors. In 1883, he helped push through the Pendleton Act. Failing to please either machine politicians or reformers, Arthur was the last incumbent president to be denied renomination for a second term by his own party.
The Pendleton Act stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit. It provided for selection of government employees through competitive examinations. It also made it unlawful to fire or demote covered employees for political reasons or to require them to give political service or payment, and it set up a Civil Service Commission to enforce the law. When the Pendleton Act went into effect, only 10 percent of the government’s 132,000 civilian employees were placed under civil service. The rest remained at the disposal of the party power, which could distribute for patronage, payoffs, or purchase. Today, more than 90 percent of the 2.7 million federal civilian employees are covered by merit systems. In 1884, New York became the first state to adopt a civil service system for state workers. Massachusetts became the second state when it started a merit system in 1885.
During the 1870s and 1880s, the Democratic and Republican Parties were of almost exactly equal strength. In the elections between 1876 and 1892, no more than 3.1 percentage points separated the two parties. The two parties differed enormously in their principles, programs, and ethno-cultural composition. In the late 19th century, it was sometimes said that there wasn’t a dime’s difference between the two parties, that the difference between the two parties was the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee. This wasn’t true.
The Republican Party tended to emphasize national unity, economic modernization, and moral reform. Regarding the Democrats as the party of treason for opposing the Civil War, the Republicans ran Union veterans in eight of nine presidential elections between 1868 and 1900. The sole exception, James G. Blaine, lost his presidential bid in 1884. The party urged the faithful to “vote as you shot.” They portrayed Democrats as “the old slave-owner and slave driver, the saloon-keeper, the ballot-box-stuffer, KKK members, the criminal class of the great cities, the men who cannot read or write.”
The Republicans were committed to rapidly modernizing the economy through such measures as protective tariffs to assist industry and land grants to encourage railroad construction. The Republican Party was also committed to using the 14th Amendment to protect corporations’ ability to operate free from excessive state regulation. The Democrats were split on this program of economic modernization. Grover Cleveland supported big business and the gold standard but in 1887 came out strongly against the tariff, which he viewed as a tax on consumers for the benefit of rich industrialists.
Who were some of the period’s most famous bosses who influenced the ways that people voted? William Tweed was the New York City boss. Tweed was a New York City politician who led a group of corrupt politicians who gained power in the Democratic Party in 1863. Their machine came to known as Tammany Hall. Although he held minor elective offices, Tweed primarily exercised power through his control of patronage, the ability to appoint supporters to jobs in New York City government. For instance, after he was appointed commissioner of public works, Tweed enlarged the street maintenance crew to include twelve jobs as “manure inspectors.”
Not only did Tweed maintain and increase his power by rewarding his supporters, he also profited personally from business conducted by the city of New York. For a company to receive business contracts with the city, it had to inflate its prices and kick back a portion of its income to Tweed and his closest associates in local government. This coterie of corrupt politicians enriching themselves at the public’s expense was known at the time as the Tweed Ring.
The Tweed Ring was successful in part because it was popular among many voters, especially the Irish immigrants who had flooded the city in search of a better livelihood. Tweed and his friends ensured that Irish-American supporters received jobs and other assistance from the city government and from companies doing business with the city. For example, the construction cost of the New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861, grew to nearly $13 million, about $178 million in today’s dollars, and nearly twice the cost of the Alaska Purchase in 1867. “A carpenter was paid $360,751 (roughly $4.9 million today) for one month’s labor in a building with very little woodwork … a plasterer got $133,187 ($1.82 million) for two days’ work”. Tweed and his friends garnered huge profits from the city’s urban development. This greed, however, also proved to be Tweed’s undoing. Convicted in 1877 for stealing as much as $200 million from the city’s tax revenues, Tweed died in a jail cell far removed from his once-great base of power.
Tweed’s downfall did not signal an end to political machines in the Gilded Age. However, there emerged another phenomenon, one that saw non-immigrant Americans trying to use politics for social causes such as the banning of alcohol in the U.S. Perhaps the most notable of these “single issue interest groups” was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In many towns in Ohio and New York in the fall of 1873 women concerned about the destructive power of alcohol met in churches to pray and then marched to the saloons to ask the owners to close their establishments. They met with success but it was only temporary so by the next summer the women concluded that they must become organized nationally. This led to the founding of the WCTU-the oldest continuing non-sectarian woman’s organization in the world.
What was behind this movement’s agenda? National Prohibition has been interpreted as a cultural war between Protestants who were already well established in North American and the newer Catholic and Jewish immigrants, who typically drank alcohol beverages as part of their cultures. In addition, Protestants tended to live in rural areas and towns whereas the newer immigrants tended to settle in large cities, thus creating another division. The WCTU was anxious to “Americanize” new immigrants, which meant to them, to persuade them to abstain from alcohol beverages. In the first two decades of the twentieth century much of its budget was spent on its center on Ellis Island in order to begin this “Americanization” process. The WCTU was especially concerned about the immigration of Irish and Germans and what it believed was the threat they posed to the promotion of prohibition.
According to the Ohio Historical Society, “From the mid 1870s to the early 1890s, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was the major organization within the United States seeking Prohibition. Its members utilized rather extreme tactics to convince Americans to abstain from alcohol. Members picketed bars and saloons. They prayed for the souls of the bar patrons. They also tried to block the entryways of establishments that sold liquor. Although the WCTU is most closely associated with the prohibition of alcohol, it is not simply a “one-issue organization.” It has addressed a number of other social reform issues, including “lust-free” marriage, sanitation, abstinence from tobacco, public health, abortion, homosexuality, labor rights, premarital chastity, eugenics, prostitution, gambling, pornography, international peace, dress reform, illicit drugs, suffrage, same-sex marriage, women’s rights, the “War on Christmas,” the display of Scripture in public places, and maintaining Blue laws prohibiting golf and other leisure activities on Sundays.
What can me conclude about Gilded Age politics? The Gilded Age will be remembered for the accomplishments of thousands of American thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs, writers, and promoters of social justice. Although politicians had limited impact on the tremendous change transforming America, there is still much we can learn by examining the so-called forgettable presidents and the issues with which they grappled. Of course, we must also study the power of bosses and machines all as a precursor to understanding the nature and scope of reforms that will emerge once the Gilded Age lost its luster.
The American Age of Progress: The Progressive Era
As its name implies, the Progressive period was rooted in the dual claims that (a) humans could make “progress” in their society and (b) governmental structures were the best tools for achieving desired social progress. The period took place from roughly 1890-1920. It reflected many of the issues, ideas, and voters’ concerns that took center stage during the Gilded Age. A growing number of native-born Americans feared that the country’s republican traditions were being steadily eroded by the growth of business monopolies, machine corruption, and the violent struggle between capital and labor.
Few periods in American history witnessed more ferment than the years that spanned the Progressive Era. This movement touched every aspect of American life. It transformed government into an active, interventionist entity at the national level, most notably under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but also at the state and local levels. For the first time Americans were prepared to use government, including the federal government, as an instrument of reform.
Progressive reformers secured a federal income tax based on the ability to pay; formulated inheritance taxes; devised a modern national banking system; and developed government regulatory commissions to oversee banking, insurance, railroads, gas, electricity, telephones, transportation, and manufacturing. Education also became a self-conscious instrument of social change. The ideas of the educator and philosopher John Dewey influenced the reformers. Progressive educational reformers broadened school curricula to include teaching about health and community life; called for active learning that would engage students’ minds and draw out their talents; applied new scientific discoveries about learning; and tailored teaching techniques to students’ needs. Progressive educators promoted compulsory education laws, kindergartens, and high schools. They raised the literacy rate of African Americans from 43 percent to 77 percent.
During the Progressive Era, public health officers launched successful campaigns against hookworm, malaria, and pellagra, and reduced the incidence of tuberculosis, typhoid, and diphtheria. Pure milk campaigns also slashed rates of infant and child mortality. Urban Progressives also created public parks, libraries, hospitals, and museums. They constructed new water and sewer systems and eliminated “red-light” districts, such as New Orleans’ Storyville, in most major cities.
To bridge the gap between capital and labor, Progressives called for arbitration and mediation of labor disputes. Meanwhile, many Progressive businessmen called for a new-style “welfare capitalism” that provided workers with higher wages and pensions.
The Progressive era was one of the most creative in the realm of culture and the arts. In the hands of Alfred Stieglitz, photography became an art form for the first time. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright helped create modern architecture. The first exhibition of modern art, the Armory Show in New York in 1913, was held in the United States.
A new vocabulary characterized this era. Americans would speak about a “public interest” that was opposed by “special interests.” They would also speak about “efficiency” and “expertise” in government and “morality” in foreign affairs. For the first time, Americans spoke of “social workers,” “muckrakers,” “trustbusters,” “feminists,” “social scientists,” and “conservation.” To increase popular control over government, Progressive reformers lobbied successfully for direct primaries; the elimination of boss rule; the direct election of Senators; woman’s suffrage; and in many state legislatures, adoption of the referendum, the initiative, and the recall. Reformers also saw adoption of the first restrictions on political lobbyists and the first regulations on campaign finances.
To modernize government finances, Progressives successfully instituted the income tax and established the Federal Reserve System to oversee the nation’s economy. To regulate corporate behavior, Progressives enforced new anti-trust laws and established the country’s first effective regulatory commissions. They also established licenses for such professionals as pharmacists, veterinarians, and undertakers. To improve social welfare, they lobbied for workmen’s compensation laws, minimum wage laws for women workers, and old-age and widow’s pensions. To improve public health, Progressive reformers successfully lobbied for water standards, state and local departments of health, sanitary codes for schools, and laws prohibiting the sale of adulterated foods and drugs.
The Progressive era also had a much more negative side. It saw the spread of disfranchisement and segregation of African Americans in the South and even in the federal government. This era also saw the enactment of reforms, such as at-large voting, that lessened the political influence of immigrant groups at a time when city budgets were increasing. Critics frequently condemned Progressives as moralistic, undemocratic, and elitist. In fact, Progressives did not agree on a single agenda. They disagreed vehemently in their attitudes toward such subjects as immigration restriction and prohibition of alcohol. They were a diverse lot that included Republicans and Democrats, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and urban and rural reformers. Women’s organizations stood at the forefront of the social reforms and policy innovations during the Progressive era. Women activists were especially active in efforts to end child labor and to protest companies that had unsafe working conditions or produced unsafe products. For the most part, Progressives were urban and college-educated, including journalists, academics, teachers, doctors, and nurses, as well as many business people.
Uniting these various reform movements stemmed from a preoccupation with the elimination of corruption and waste and an emphasis on efficiency, science, and professional expertise as the best ways to solve social problems. A book published in 1913, Benjamin Parker De Witt’s The Progressive Movement, argued that three tendencies underlay progressive reforms: the desire to eliminate political corruption, the impulse to make government more efficient and effective, and a belief that government should “relieve social and economic distress.” Progressives wanted to apply the techniques of systematization, rationalization, and bureaucratic administrative control developed by business to problems posed by the city and industry.
For all its flaws and limitations, the Progressive era was instrumental in formulating the rationale for much of the welfare state, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, and aid to single parent families. Here are just a few of the areas where Progressives left a meaningful impact on the larger society.
In 1916, Margaret Sanger, a former nurse, opened the country’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Police shut it down ten days later. “No woman can call herself free,” she insisted, “until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” Margaret Sanger coined the phrase “birth control” and eventually convinced the courts that the Comstock Act did not prohibit doctors from distributing birth control information and devices. As founder of Planned Parenthood, she aided in the development of the birth control pill, which appeared in 1960. This was a massive achievement, standing alongside women receiving the voting rights (also a Progressive era gain) in the history of American behaviors.
There was also government reform. This was an effort to lock down the bosses and machines and also to make the government capable of limiting robber baron abusiveness toward the common man. It started first in Wisconsin. Republican governor Robert LaFollette put into effect the “Wisconsin idea,” which provided a model for reformers across the nation. It provided for direct primaries to select party nominees for public office and for a railroad commission to regulate railroad rates. The model also presented tax reform, opposition to political bosses, and the initiative and recall, devices to give the people more direct control over government. Another figure using government to help limit elite power was Theodore Roosevelt. As president between 1901-1908, he instructed his attorney general to file suit against Northern Securities, a railroad holding company, and the Beef Trust in Chicago, for illegal constraint of trade. He wanted to use his power as an elected leader to help the little guy, to give him a “square deal” that showed rich people would now have to answer to the president. Unlike in earlier periods, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled to support the rights of labor that meant they had finally shifted views and voted against the robber baron types.
People found out about this sort of stuff by reading the newspapers. And specifically by reading stories published by so-called muckrakers. Muckraking reporters, exploiting mass circulation journalism, attacked malfeasance in American politics and business. President Theodore Roosevelt gave them the name “muckrakers” after a character in the book Pilgrim’s Progress, “the Man with the Muckrake,” who was more preoccupied with filth than with Heaven above.
Popular magazines such as McClure’s, Everybody’s, Pearson’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s published articles exposing the evils of American society–political corruption, stock market manipulation, fake advertising, vices, impure food and drugs, racial discrimination, and lynching. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry. John Spargo’s Bitter Cry of the Children disclosed the abuse of child laborers in the nation’s coal mines. Lincoln Steffin’s The Shame of the Cities uncovered corruption in city government.
The basic challenge confronting early 20th century America was to respond to the problems that had accompanied the transformation of American society from a rural, agricultural culture into an urban, industrial society. Filled with faith in the power of government, Progressives launched reform in the areas of public health, housing, urban planning and design, parks and recreation, workplace safety, workers’ compensation, pensions, insurance, poor relief, and health care. Their effort has a massive impact on the 1890s-1920s and would continue to shape later epochs in American history. It is almost impossible not to recognize the ways in which claims the progressives made about government having a responsibility to try and improve the society still ring loudly in modern debates etc.
The American Quest For Empire
By 1890, the United States had by far the world’s most productive economy. However, this aside, the United States was not a great military or diplomatic power. Its army numbered less than 30,000 troops, and its navy had only about 10,000 seamen. Britain’s army was five times the size of its American counterpart, and its navy was ten times bigger. The United States’ military was small because the country was situated between two large oceans and was surrounded by weak or friendly nations. It faced no serious military threats and had little interest in asserting military power overseas.
From the Civil War until the 1890s, most Americans had little interest in territorial expansion. William Seward, the secretary of state under presidents Lincoln and Johnson, did envision American expansion into Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Iceland, Greenland, Hawaii, and other Pacific islands. But he realized only two small parts of this vision. In 1867, the United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $72 million and occupied the Midway Islands in the Pacific.
Americans resisted expansion for two major reasons. One was that imperial rule seemed inconsistent with America’s republican principles. George Washington had specifically warned the country against becoming involved with other nations’ business. This was the inherited tradition in the U.S. since the 1790s. A second reason was that the United States was uninterested in acquiring people with different cultures, languages, and religions. This fact of life in the U.S., as urbanization took root, was something with which native-born Americans struggled mightily. Nevertheless, the Progressive spirit of the time led some citizens to argue that the United States had a duty to uplift backward societies. Just as they (running government agencies) could help the U.S. to progress, so, too, the period’s mainstream wisdom held, could they help the world.
By the mid-1890s, a shift had taken place in American attitudes toward expansion that was sparked partly by a European scramble for empire. Between 1870 and 1900, the European powers seized 10 million square miles of territory in Africa and Asia, a fifth of the world’s land mass. About 150 million people were subjected to colonial rule. In the United States, a growing number of policy makers, bankers, manufacturers, and trade unions grew fearful that the country might be closed out in the struggle for global markets and raw materials. Tied to this concern was a Eugenics-based claim that the world’s nations were engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival. The U.S. had a responsibility to its White, Anglo Saxon heritage to compete. Whatever the reason, there is little question that a new assertiveness on the part of the United States was taking hold. The best way to channel this energy, however, was yet undecided.
One man who had an idea was Alfred Thayer Mahan. He was a naval strategist and the author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. His research argued that national prosperity and power depended on control of the world’s sea-lanes. “Whoever rules the waves rules the world,” Mahan wrote. To become a major naval power, the United States began to replace its wooden sailing ships with steel vessels powered by coal or oil in 1883. But control of the seas would also require the acquisition of naval bases and coaling stations. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm had copies of Mahan’s books placed on every ship in the German High Seas Fleet and the Japanese government put translations in its imperial bureaus. This indicated that, during the 1890s and early 1900s, whoever was to prosper in their quest for empire would have to be prepared for military struggle.
American foreign policy makers took up this challenge. The United States came close to declaring war against Germany over Samoa in 1889; against Chile in 1891, over the treatment of U.S. sailors; and against Britain in 1895, over a territorial dispute between Venezuela and Britain. American involvement in the overthrow of Hawaii’s monarchy in 1893 precipitated a momentous debate over the United States’ global role. They debated whether the U.S. should behave like a great power and seize colonies or whether it should remain something different and more uplifting.
The debate over America’s global role intensified when Cubans began to fight for their independence from Spain in 1895. Americans were sympathetic to Cuba’s struggle for independence, but were divided about how to help. The Republican speaker of the House did not want “to spill American blood,” unless American interests were directly threatened, whereas Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican assistant secretary of the Navy, pushed for war against Spain.
President William McKinley was deeply ambivalent about war against Spain. The last president to have served in the Civil War, McKinley said he had seen too much carnage at battles like Antietam to be enthusiastic about war with Spain. “I’ve been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.” Ultimately, however, the pressure of public opinion forced McKinley into the war that made the United States an international power. Newspaper publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer worked up war fever among the public with reports of Spanish atrocities against Cuban rebels. This process, known as yellow journalism, remains a clear part of U.S. foreign policy. Please recall that prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, newspapers and media outlets declared loudly that Iraq’s leader was committing atrocities against his people and possessed weapons of mass destruction as well.
In late 1898, an explosion sank the U.S.S. Maine in Cuban’s Havana harbor. A naval court of inquiry blamed the explosion on a mine, further inflaming public sentiment against Spain. It is notable that modern historians roundly agree that possible blame for the explosion might be owed to the American sailor reported to have been smoking next to the ship’s gunpowder cache. Not all the sailors died form the Maine’s explosion; many told of card game (with smoking) taking place in the ammunition well.
It ultimately did not matter who destroyed the warship. After ten days of debate, Congress declared war, but only after adopting the Teller Amendment. The amendment made it clear that the United States did not harbor imperialist ambitions, and it announced that the United States would not acquire Cuba. European leaders were shocked by this declaration. Britain’s Queen Victoria called on the European power to “unite…against such unheard [of] conduct,” since the United States might in the future declare Ireland and other colonies independent.
But after the United States defeated Spain, it set up a military government on Cuba and made the soldiers’ withdrawal contingent on the Cubans accepting the Platt Amendment. This amendment was quite different that the Teller Amendment. The Platt Amendment gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba to protect “life, property, and individual liberties.” It also established a permanent U.S. naval station on the island of Cuba that is still open today.
All in all, President McKinley characterized the Spanish-American War as “splendid.” The 144-day war also resulted in the United States taking control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The U.S. had acquired a global empire from the Spanish. It also, however, had begun a bloody (and quite new) chapter in American history. Indeed, the United States started the 20th Century engaged in a bloody, but largely forgotten war. The Philippine American War, fought from February 1899 to July 1902, claimed 250,000 (mostly Pilipino) lives and helped establish the United States as a power in the Pacific. The conflict was a sequel to the Spanish American War of 1898, which had been waged, in part, in support of Cubans fighting for independence from Spain. But it was also fueled by American desire to become a world power.
On February 4, 1899, fighting erupted between American and Filipino soldiers, leaving 59 Americans and approximately 3,000 Filipinos dead. With the vice president casting a tie-breaking vote, a congressional resolution declaring the Philippines independent was defeated. American commanders hoped for a short conflict, but in the end, more than 70,000 would fight in the archipelago. Unable to defeat the United States in conventional warfare, the Filipinos and their leader, General Emilio Aguinaldo, adopted guerrilla tactics. To suppress the insurgency, villages were forcibly relocated or burned. Non-combatant civilians were imprisoned or killed. Americans employed vicious torture techniques on suspected insurrects, such as the water cure, in which a suspect was made to lie face up while water was poured onto his face. Aspects of this technique, of course, reappeared in the American invasion of Iraq under the name water boarding. American general in the Philippines did not see any other solution better than treating the local population harshly.
One general declared:
“It may be necessary to kill half of the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.”
The most notorious incident of the war took place on Samar Island. In retaliation for a Filipino raid on an American garrison, in which American troops had been massacred, General Jacob W. Smith told his men to turn the island into a “howling wilderness” so that “even birds could not live there.” He directed a marine major to kill “all persons…capable of bearing arms.” He meant everyone over the age of 10. Smith was court-martialed and “admonished” for violating military discipline.
In truth, U.S. leaders tried to transform the country into a showcase of American-style democracy in Asia. But there was a strong undercurrent of condescension and racism. U.S. President William Howard Taft, who had served as governor-general of the Philippines, called the Filipinos “our little brown brothers.” Current observers could not help but remember that U.S. lawmakers had banned Chinese immigration, capturing the levels of anti-Asian attitudes common among many U.S. policy makers, the prior decade.
No discussion of the American quest for empire during the early 20th century would be complete without examining Theodore Roosevelt, who had become president after William McKinley’s assassination. The well-known Progressive leader believed the U.S. had an obligation to help the world “elect decent men” and he set about flexing U.S. power. He announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:
“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the western hemisphere, the adherence of the U.S. to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of international police power.”
This assertion was remarkable at the time, but it was extremely powerful in its impact. I will leave it to you to think about whether or not you think that modern U.S. presidents use the Roosevelt Corollary in their own foreign policies!
To enforce order, forestall foreign intervention, and protect U.S. economic interests, the United States intervened in the Caribbean and Central America some 20 times over the next quarter century–namely, in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama. Each intervention followed a common pattern: after intervening to restore order, U.S. forces became embroiled in the countries’ internal political disputes. Before exiting, the United States would train and fund a police force and military to maintain order and would sponsor an election intended to put into power a strong leader supportive of American interests. Unfortunately, the men who took power in many of these countries, such as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Francois Duvalier in Haiti, established despotic rule.
Of course, the most notable part of Roosevelt’s foreign policy as it related to U.S. empire was the Panama Canal. Prior to the development of the atomic bomb and the landing of astronauts on the moon, the Panama Canal was perhaps this country’s signal engineering achievement. Fifty-one miles long, with about $3.5 billion in bases and infrastructure, the canal links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The story of how the U.S. came to own land in South America, however, points to the growing American Empire. The Isthmus of Panama was located in Colombia, which had rejected a U.S. proposal to build a canal. “You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail currant jelly to a wall,” President Theodore Roosevelt said in response to the rejection. Years later, President Roosevelt said that the people of Panama rebelled against Colombia “literally as one man.” A senator quipped, “Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt.” In 1911, Roosevelt said bluntly, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal but to debate me.” In 1906, eager to see the greatest accomplishment of his presidency, he became the first president to travel overseas. He went to Panama at the height of the rainy season and took the controls of a 95-ton steam shovel. Built at a cost of $387 million over a period of 10 years, the Panama Canal was a declaration of America’s coming of age in the world.
The American quest for empire had various motivating factors. One overriding idea was the U.S. needed to compete in order to survive globally as other nations were also becoming more powerful. Another common belief was the U.S. was helping the world. This claim mirrored Progressive claims made domestically, and offered Americans a welcoming platform upon which to stand as their cheered their country’s successes.
America and the First World War, 1914-18
World War I killed more people (more than 9 million military and another 5 million noncombatants), involved more countries (28 nations), and cost more money ($186 billion/direct costs; $151 billion/ indirect costs), than any previous war in history. It was the first war to use airplanes, tanks, long-range artillery, submarines, and poison gas. It left at least 7 million men permanently disabled.
World War I probably had more far-reaching consequences than any other preceding war. Four years of war killed a million troops from the British Empire; 1.5 million troops from the Hapsburg Empire; 1.7 million French troops; 1.7 million Russians; and 2 million German troops. Politically, it resulted in the downfall of four monarchies–in Russia in 1917, in Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918, and in Turkey in 1922. It contributed to the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917 and the triumph of fascism in Italy in 1922. It ignited colonial revolts in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. Economically, the war severely disrupted the European economies and allowed the United States to become the world’s business power. American bankers and robber barons ruled the world. The war also brought vast social consequences, including the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey and an influenza epidemic that killed over 25 million people worldwide. The Great Flu of 1918 is, for many, a forgotten piece of history. My feelings are, however, that educated Americans should know about this episode in the nation’s history.
No one expected much of World War I. At first, the armies relied on outdated methods of communication, such as carrier pigeons. However, by the time the conflict was over, tanks, submarines, airplane-dropped bombs, machine guns, and poison gas had transformed the nature of modern warfare. In a single day at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, some 100,000 British troops plodded into steady machine gunfire from Germans. Some 60,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. Those who witnessed the fighting endured new disorders such as “battle fatigue,” “shell shock,” and something the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud termed as “nervosa.” The newspapers claimed that WW I would be the “war to end all wars.” It really just set the stage for WW II two decades later.
How did this all happen? The answer is, unfortunately, not easy to explain or understand. On June 28, 1914, a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial Hapsburg throne, made a wrong turn in the city of Sarajevo. This city rests in the nation today known as Serbia, geographically close to places such as Greece and Romania. In 1914, the area was controlled by Austria and this is why their archduke was riding around the city in the first place. As the car tried to turn around, someone approached, pulled out a revolver, and shot twice. Within an hour, the Archduke and his wife were dead. The man who killed him, Gavrilo Princip, was a 19-year-old Bosnian nationalist who worked with a group called the “Black Hand.” This group, and ostensibly also Princip, wanted Austria to give up control of the Balkans and let Serbia and Bosnia become free.
This really wasn’t on the minds of the Austrians, however. Their archduke and his wife were assassinated in open daylight. The emperor of the Austria-Hungary wanted to punish Serbia. Austria was, however, weak internationally and they asked for Germany (a more powerful nation) to lend some diplomatic and military support to punishing Serbia. Meanwhile, Russia, fearful of Austrian and German expansion into the Balkans, strongly supported the Serbs and began to mobilize its army. This move made Germany’s leadership fear encirclement by Russia and France. Germany sent an ultimatum to France asking it to declare its neutrality in the event of a conflict between Russia and Germany. The French refused. They were obligated by treaty to support Russia and were still bitter over their defeat by Prussia in 1871. When Russia failed to demobilize its forces, the German Kaiser agreed to war.
World War I caught most people by surprise. Lulled by a century of peace–Europeans had not seen a large-scale war since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815–many observers had come to regard armed conflict as a relic of the past, rendered unthinkable by human progress. World War I shattered these dreams. The war demonstrated that death and destruction had not yet been banished from human affairs.
Faced by Russia to its east and France to its west, Germany believed that its only hope for victory was to strike first. The German military had formulated a blueprint (known as the Schlieffen Plan) for victory in Western Europe in 42 days. The attack would occur before the Russians would have time to advance from the east. The plan called for a preemptive strike at France through Belgium.
Germany’s plan involved a violation of international law. Belgium was a neutral country and Britain was committed to its defense. Thus, a German invasion was certain to bring Britain into the war. Germany asked for permission to move its troops through Belgium. But King Albert, the country’s monarch, refused by saying, “Belgium is a nation, not a road.” Germany decided to press ahead anyway; its forces invaded Belgium on August 3.
The German military strategy worked better on paper than it did in practice. While fierce resistance by 200,000 Belgian soldiers did not stop the German advance, it did give Britain and France time to mobilize their forces. Meanwhile, Russia mobilized faster than expected, forcing Germany to divert 100,000 troops to the eastern front. German hopes for a quick victory were dashed at the first battle of the Marne in September 1914, when a retreating French army launched a powerful counter-attack, assisted by 6,000 troops transported to the front by 1,200 Parisian taxicabs.
After the Allies halted Germany’s massive offensive through France and Belgium at the Marne River, the Great War bogged down into trench warfare and a ghastly stalemate ensued. Lines of men, stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss border, formed an unmovable battlefront across northern France. Four million troops burrowed into trenches that were 6-to-8 feet deep and wide enough for two men to pass each other. The trenches stretched for 450 miles. The soldiers were ravaged by tuberculosis and plagued with lice and rats. They stared at each other across barren expanses called “no-man’s land” and fought pitched battles over narrow strips of blood-soaked earth.
To end the stalemate, Germany introduced several military innovations in 1915. But none proved decisive. Germany dispatched submarines to prevent merchant ships from reaching Britain; it added poison chlorine gas to its military arsenal at the second battle of Ypres in northern France; and it dropped incendiary bombs over London from a zeppelin. Airplanes, tanks, and hand grenades were other innovations that distinguished World War I from previous conflicts. But the machine gun did most of the killing, firing eight bullets per second.
In a fateful attempt to break the deadlock, German forces adopted a new objective in 1916: to kill so many French soldiers that France would be forced to sue for peace. The German plan was to attack the French city of Verdun, a psychologically important town in northeastern France, and to bleed the French dry. The battle–the war’s longest–lasted from February 21, 1916 through July. The battle also engaged two million soldiers. When it ended, Verdun had become a symbol of wartime futility. France had suffered 315,000 casualties, Germany 280,000. The town was destroyed; however, the front had not moved. In 1917, after two-and-a-half years of fighting, 5 million troops were dead and the western front remained deadlocked.
Germany was desperate to break the stalemate. In January 1917, they launched unrestricted submarine warfare, hoping to cripple the British economy. German subs sank a half million tons of Allied shipping each month, leaving Britain with only a six week supply of grain. But these German U-boats risked bringing the United States into the war. One episode captured this risk for Germany wholly. On May 7, 1915, a German torpedo sank the Lusitania, a ship carrying many British and American citizens. A total of 1,198 passengers and crewmembers lost their lives. The Lusitania had previously made a half dozen Atlantic round trips without incident. Few believed that a civilian passenger ship would be deliberately targeted.
Following the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Germany would institute a moratorium on unrestricted submarine warfare. However, pressure on the German high command to resume unrestricted submarine warfare was great. It was viewed as the only way to starve Britain and France into submission. This resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare would ultimately bring the United States into the war.
Please understand that American President Wilson was reluctant to enter World War I. When the War began, he declared U.S. neutrality and demanded that the belligerents respect American rights as a neutral party. He hesitated to embroil the United States in the conflict with good reason. Americans were deeply divided about the European war; involvement in the conflict would certainly disrupt Progressive reforms. In 1914, he had warned that entry into the conflict would bring an end to Progressive reform. “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war,” he said. A popular song in 1915 was “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”
President Wilson called on Americans to be “neutral in thought as well as deed.” The United States, however, quickly began to lean toward Britain and France. Convinced that wartime trade was necessary to fuel the growth of American trade, President Wilson refused to impose an embargo on trade with the belligerents. During the early years of the war, trade with the allies tripled. This volume of trade quickly exhausted the allies’ cash reserves, forcing them to ask the United States for credit. In October 1915, President Wilson permitted loans to belligerents, a decision that greatly favored Britain and France. By 1917, American loans to the allies had soared to $2.25 billion; loans to Germany stood at a paltry $27 million.
In March 1917, events turned the U.S. ever closer to the fighting. Americans newspapers published the Zimmerman Note, an intercepted telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador to Mexico. The telegram said that if Germany went to war with the United States, Germany promised to help Mexico recover the territory it had lost during the 1840s, including Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona. The Zimmerman telegram and German attacks on three U.S. ships in mid-March led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Wilson decided viewed the war as an opportunity to destroy German militarism. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he told a joint session of Congress. Most lawmakers agreed with the president’s Progressive claim that the U.S. could win through battle a more peaceful world and only six Senators and 50 Representatives voted against the war declaration.
The U.S. Army was not, however, actually ready to go to war. In 1917, they had only 107,641 men conscripted and these soldiers were unprepared for the type of warfare unfolding in Europe. Within a year, in the last year of the four-year conflict, the United States raised a five million-man army. Although much shorter than the other nations’ engagements, the American armed forces were a decisive factor in blunting a German offensive and ending the bloody stalemate.
Initially, President Wilson hoped to limit America’s contribution to supplies, financial credits, and moral support. But by early 1917, the allied forces were on the brink of collapse. The United States was forced to quickly assume an active role in the conflict. As a preliminary step, American ships relieved the British of responsibility for patrolling the Western Hemisphere, while another portion of the U.S. fleet steamed to the north Atlantic to combat German submarines. To raise troops, President Wilson insisted on a military draft. Tens of millions of men responded to the call. This included more than 100,000 African American troops, many of whom were placed under Gen. Jack Sherman’s command.
In March 1918, the Germans launched a massive offensive on the western front in France’s Somme River valley. With German troops barely 50 miles from Paris, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the leader of the French army, assumed command of the allied forces. Foch’s troops, aided by 85,000 American soldiers, launched a furious counteroffensive. By the end of October, the counterattack pushed the German army back to the Belgian border. In June 1918, some 279,000 American soldiers crossed the Atlantic; in July over 300,000; in August, 286,000 more. All told, 1.5 million American troops arrived in Europe during the last six months of the war. By the end of the conflict, the allies could field 600,000 more men than the Germans.
At 11:00 a.m., November 11, 1918, the guns stopped. The German Army, never defeated in battle, surrendered and was allowed to retreat with honor. The struggles that WW I would produce for Germany, however, had really only just begun. Europe on a whole was in tatters; communist revolutionaries now controlled Russia. World War I found the U.S. among the victors, but there was nothing really gained. It was a rough time for many. The war of course changed the U.S., in many ways, the least of which the once-isolationist country was moving closer and closer to becoming a global power. This is another step, following the Spanish American, which shows the U.S. moving in a direction of active militarism in foreign policy. With WW I, the U.S. became enmeshed in the very entangling alliances that President Washington had warned against in the late 1790s. And the trend would prove irrevocable.